Everyone is on a spectrum

While doing research for her thesis, Holly Warland was pleasantly surprised to come up with evidence to disprove a commonly-held belief about people who identify with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Regardless of your level of extraversion, social interaction can get difficult and tiring. You have to soak in body language, facial expressions, tone, nuances, volume, speed, and content within milliseconds to make a decision about the intentions of the communicator. Swirling thoughts of 'Was Mark being sarcastic when he said that?' or 'Did Jane lie about having to work late tonight?' can distract you from your work and hobbies, and sometimes cause significant distress. As rewarding as interpersonal communication can be, it can also be challenging.

Scientists call this ability to intuitively detect another's meaning Theory of Mind (ToM). At its simplest, children around 4 - 5 years of age begin to understand that others don't necessarily share their perspective. This is often tested by asking small children to consider a scene where they and another observer have different perspectives. For example, a child may be sitting opposite a toy sheep, but 'dolly' is sitting opposite a toy cow. The child is then asked what dolly can see. Very young children cannot separate their own perspective from dolly's and erroneously assume that dolly sees the same as they do (i.e. a toy sheep). It is not until about 4 years of age that they can confidently separate their own mind from another's, and correctly answer that they see a sheep, but dolly sees a cow.

ToM ability doesn't begin and end in childhood. Consider, how do you tell if someone is being truthful? Or if they are attempting to mask their real feelings with another emotion? All the trickier applications of ToM improve throughout childhood and adolescence, and possibly even into adulthood. Most of us aren't even aware that our ToM is constantly on duty, to detect other's moods, state of mind, expressions, and even more sophisticated abilities such as noting sarcasm, lying, or deliberate attempts to supress deception.

This is why I was interested in gauging the general public's ToM abilities with regards to the fairly pedestrian skill of reading facial expressions, and the more sophisticated skill of detecting deception. ToM comes naturally to most, but it can be difficult for those with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). To investigate the differences between neurotypical and ASD adults, I engaged 788 participants to complete online facial expression and deception detection tests for my thesis in psychology.

The massive response to my call-out for participants was a delightful surprise to me as a lowly honours student desperate for people to participate in my research. It seems that people are curious about and eager to test their social skills.

As previous research has demonstrated, and as many parents, friends, partners or siblings of people with ASD can tell you, the ASD participants performed significantly worse than the neurotypical participants on the facial expression task. However, they performed no worse on the deception-detection task.

There were no significant differences in gender for either groups (ASD or neurotypical), despite the popular proposition that women are often better at these social skills than men. This result was very surprising considering that the ratio of boys and girls with autism is approximately 4:1 respectively.

I started my research with the hypothesis that the neurotypical participants would perform significantly better compared to the ASD participants in both the facial expression and deception detection tasks. This assumption was quickly proven wrong as I delved deeper into the data.

The deception detection task consisted of two scenarios with follow up questions relating to the character's deceptive actions and language. ToM was tested by asking the participants to consider the thoughts and responses of another person (and to interpret their true meaning). Previous research suggests that we reach our peak ToM levels by our teenage years, therefore I predicted that most of the neurotypical participants would answer the questions correctly. I assumed: they're all adults; they should have an adequate understanding of lying. Discovering that this prediction was incorrect was the highlight of my research. Only 45% of the neurotypical participants answered the questions correctly. Less than half of them could engage their advanced ToM skills to figure out if an imaginary character was being deceived.

Within this fascinating discovery was another oddity. The neurotypical participants over the age of 35 performed significantly better than the younger participants in the deception detection task that involved lying about engaging in an affair. Of course this doesn't mean that people over 35 are better at having affairs (well maybe), but it could be that these results support the old notion that 'with age comes wisdom'. It makes sense that the more life experience you have, the better equipped you will be to handle and interpret difficult social circumstances.

So what does this all mean for people in everyday life? Personally, I like to think my research findings have emphasised the importance of remembering that everyone is on a spectrum, not just those with ASD. Humans vary dramatically in their social abilities. No-one is 'normal'. And if you think you are being deceived, phone Mum.

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